Leica R7

The R7 is the Leica R most people actually shoot, and the reason is the metering. It sits near the end of the manual-focus R line, the last body before Leica threw out the old shape and built the R8 from scratch in 1996. Everything Leica had learned about putting electronics behind a Leica lens went into this one. Aperture priority, manual, TTL flash, a meter that reads either the whole frame or a small selective circle in the middle. Of all the R bodies, this is the one that does the most for you without a fight.

Pick it up and the first thing you notice is that it does not feel like a Leica M. It is bigger, squarer, heavier in the way an electronic SLR from the early nineties is heavy. The finder is bright, and the focusing screen gives you a microprism collar around a split-image center, so nailing focus on a fast Summicron is quick even in poor light. The shutter is a vertical focal-plane unit, electronically timed, running from long four-second exposures up to about 1/2000, with flash sync at 1/100. It is a quiet, controlled sound, nothing like the slap of a big medium-format mirror. Film loads conventionally. The body runs on a 6V supply, either two 3V lithium cells or four silver-oxide button cells, and the meter and the auto modes depend on it entirely. No power, no exposure, so carry spares in whichever flavor your camera takes.

The metering is the real reason to own one. You get full-field integral averaging for normal work and a genuine selective spot pattern for the times the scene is fighting you. That spot mode is what separates the R7 from the cheaper SLRs people cross-shop it against. The catch is what aperture priority always does. Point it at a backlit portrait or a snow scene and the averaging brain wants to make everything gray, so the shadows land where the camera decides, not where you want them. This is where a Zone Light Meter spot reading earns its place. Read the shadow you care about, place it on the zone you want, and dial the exposure in by hand instead of trusting the body to guess at a high-contrast scene.

The honest weakness is the electronics. A mechanical Leicaflex from the sixties will keep firing after its meter dies. The R7 will not. When the circuitry fails, and on a thirty-year-old body it eventually can, a repair is neither cheap nor common, because fewer people work on R bodies than on M rangefinders. Light seals dry out too, and that is the easy part of the upkeep.

So who keeps shooting it? People who want Leica R glass, the Summicrons and Elmarits and the long APO teles, without the M system's rangefinder limits at close range and long focal lengths. The R7 stays cheaper than an R8 or R9, and a great deal cheaper than the equivalent M kit, which is most of its appeal. It is the practical way into one of the best manual-focus lens systems ever made, provided you buy a clean working body and accept that a dead one is harder to revive than the glass in front of it.